May 6, 2001

By ROBERTO GONZÁLEZ ECHEVARRÍA

THE DUKE OF HAVANA
Baseball, Cuba, and the Search
for the American Dream. By Steve Fainaru and Ray Sánchez. Illustrated. 338 pp. New York: Villard. $24.95.

s Orlando Hernández lifts his left knee almost to his ear, he looks away from the target and into himself, as if searching for the source of
his strength. There is a brief pause at that moment of his elaborate windup, just before he unravels his body toward home plate, right arm trailing behind him. Then, as he looks outside again, the ball pops out of that
controlled tangle of legs and arms. The release point varies from pitch to pitch, adding to the batter's bafflement. In motion, El Duque is the embodiment of an enigma, perhaps as much to himself as to others,
including hitters. Steve Fainaru and Ray Sánchez try to solve that enigma in ''The Duke of Havana,'' a book that tells Hernández's life, focusing on his escape from Cuba and his success
with the Yankees.

Fainaru, an investigative sportswriter at The Washington Post, and Sánchez, a columnist at Newsday, avoid the hackneyed plot line that would have El Duque rising from poverty and oppression to triumph, culminating with a hard-fought victory in the
World Series. The story is much more sinuous and nuanced, and Hernández is not the only subject. ''The Duke of Havana'' is as much about Joe Cubas, the notorious agent who has led many Cuban
players to sign fabulous contracts, as it is about Hernández. It is a tale of intrigue diligently researched by Fainaru and Sánchez, who went to the island often and tracked down El Duque's family, including
his father, Arnaldo, who is also the father of Liván Hernández of the San Francisco Giants.

They also probed deep into the Cuban sports bureaucracy, Orwellian in structure and totally devoted to Fidel Castro's whims. ''The Duke of Havana'' contains the best available report of how baseball is run in Cuba. It pierces
through ideological gobbledygook to expose the contradictions of a system that proclaims freedom as its ultimate goal, yet can subject players to punishment or forced retirement without recourse. There are memorable
pages about the suspension of El Duque and Germán Mesa, a shortstop, because they were suspected of planning to escape from Cuba. Fainaru and Sánchez write that Liván Hernández's feats with
the Florida Marlins overshadowed the Cuban regime's baroque reburial of Che Guevara's remains, which coincided with the 1997 World Series -- a scheduling gaffe that would have made heads roll on Madison Avenue.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Orlando Hernández

Orlando Hernández is a decent, loyal, well-mannered man, but in the mold of a Joe DiMaggio, he is also reserved. He sometimes cannily guards his inner self behind the language barrier, at other times with silence. Fainaru and Sánchez do not
quite crack the enigma. They come closest when they relate how the young Orlando had to become his own father's keeper -- Arnaldo Hernández was a philandering drunk who had to be protected by his son; Orlando
has had to deal with serious family responsibilities from an early age. A poignant scene in the book is the authors' interview with Arnaldo, who boasts of siring major-league pitchers as he becomes intoxicated and
has to be carried away.

The truth about Hernández's escape from Cuba is finally told here. It was neither on a raft nor on a yacht, but on a fishing boat surreptitiously hired for that purpose. How this was planned and carried out to evade the Cuban police and coast
guard is a riveting story, as is the account of the agent Joe Cubas's exertions to take El Duque from the Bahamas to Costa Rica, not the United States, allowing Hernández to avoid Major League Baseball's
draft of American-based players. Cubas's schemes take up a good part of the book. But the old cloak-and-dagger was more exciting than today's cell phone and credit card. I found myself bored with some of the
anecdotes involving motels, rented vans, long-distance calls, marital strife, falling-outs between friends and shopping sprees by Cuban players in small Tennessee towns. Cubas is neither hero nor villain on a grand
scale. Like everybody else, he was out to make a buck, and his patriotic rhetoric sounds as hollow as Castro's. But one must give Cubas his due for negotiating fantastic contracts for the players while fighting
on one side a totalitarian regime and on the other Major League Baseball's rules designed to keep down salaries. These are not to be seen as equivalent threats, however; Commissioner Bud Selig can make you sign
for less than you would be worth in an open market, but he cannot throw you in jail or prevent you from leaving this or any other country.

When it comes to Cuban history and culture, the book suffers from journalistic haste. Some of its information seems acquired at the movies (Havana in the 1950's run by the mob) or fabrications floated by Castro long ago and still taken today for
the truth (40 percent illiteracy in Cuba before 1959). There are garbled stories about the history of Cuban and American baseball. Fainaru and Sánchez cannot resist American clichés about Cuba and Latin America.
(Is wanting to be free and prosperous really only an American dream?) Roman Catholicism, not Santería, is the principal religion of Cuba. The Spanish is often mangled.

Hernández and Cuba (perhaps also Cubas) are enigmatic for Americans in the way that Freud defined the uncanny -- the familiar appearing in the guise of the strange and unusual, that which is of home yet appears not to belong to it. The uncanny is
compelling precisely because of that closeness. How can baseball be so Cuban, yet Cubans not be Americans? Fainaru and Sánchez have managed to convey that feeling. Yet it is their distance from Cuba that leads
them to some of their errors.

Roberto González Echevarría is the Sterling professor of Hispanic and comparative literatures at Yale and the author of ''The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball.''